


Young in New Paris

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Being Young In Paris, Fluff and Angst, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 19:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8812672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: To be Young in New Paris, the station that orbits an icebound planet in the third arm of the galaxy, is to spend your nights drinking in the station's mirror-lit bars and theaters--and to spend a good three-quarters of your income on lodging.  Grantaire, looking to save some credits, goes in with a cheerful stranger on a sleeping pod, an arrangement that leads to some unexpected results.  But it doesn't mean anything.  It doesn't mean anything.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RavenXavier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavenXavier/gifts).



Grantaire goes to New Paris Station because it was the center of culture and art and free-thinking and nightlife and everything else that made life as a young person worth living.  He goes to New Paris because if you want to be Successful you go to one of the Big Eight planets, but if you go to drink unpronounceable alcohols and talk the effects of intersystem conflict on modern post-electronic music, you go to New Paris.  He goes to New Paris because his parents don’t expect him to do anything, and he wants to prove them wrong.

New Paris is a city that sleeps in three different shifts so that there’s always someone manning the communication hubs, so that its bars and screening rooms and VR chambes are always full.  Its thousands of corridors twist and turn without rhyme or reason, suddenly opening up on four-story atriums or just as suddenly coming up in a dead end.  They’re lit by a complex system of mirrors that capture the light from the sun and the planet’s surface and reflect it deep inside the station so almost no artificial power is used, and the light is always subtly shifting; it’s a marvel of both efficiency and extravagance.  

It’s a creature of light and mirrors that floats above the icebound planet, orbiting a star that will die in just ten thousand years.  

Space is at a premium on the station, even with the three-shift system.  When Grantaire sees the price for the little corner apartment he first looks at, his mouth literally falls open and he’s too shocked at the size of the number to even be surprised to find the cartoonish expression on his face in real life.  He downgrades to studios, poorly-lit rooms that smell of unfamiliar spices and seeping oil, and still the rent is nearly seventy-five percent of the yield of his investments in a single lunar cycle.  He could swing it--but he’d be left spending his evenings alone in his unfurnished lodgings, possibly in darkness except for the omnipresent shifting mirror-lights, and that defeats the whole purpose of coming to New Paris in the first place.

He’s swaying on his feet and starting to see double with exhaustion, having spent his first three orbits on the station sitting up in bars and cafes, when his bleary eyes focus on a handwritten notice tacked to a bulletin board outside the restroom of the fifth bar he’s visited in forty-eight hours:

Sleeping pod share

Contact xjk-0039-23

Grantaire blinks at it for almost a full minute, convinced that there’s something important here, but not quite able to wrap his exhausted brain around it.  It’s not until the person in line behind him pushes past him toward the open door of the restroom, swearing under their breath, that he snaps out of it.  He digs his Skware out of his pocket and taps out a quick message to the contact code.

The sleeping pod is number 9B: Second tier, fourth down the hallway on the right.  All the doors are exactly the same--round blue plastic hatches that look unsettlingly like the airlocks on an escape pod.  Grantaire is too sleepy to care at this point.  He isn’t even put off by the coffin jokes his potential new roommate (podmate?) makes as he swings open the hatch to show Grantaire a little windowless tunnel, just tall enough to sit up in and just long enough to lie down in.

“So yeah, it’s your standard sleeping pod,” the podmate is saying, running a hand over his shaved head.  “But . . . well, you can’t beat the price.”

The price is what Grantaire would have paid back on Rigel 6b for a three-bedroom house with a view of the icefalls.

He signs over the credits.

 

* * *

 

New Paris has gotten tacky as the solar cycles have passed.  The constant bombardment with light and sound, the three-shift system that means there’s  _ always _ a nightlife going on, grate on Grantaire’s nerves.  Even the ever-changing flashes of light from unseen sources that seemed so magical, so exciting and modern and timeless, just make him want to scream--or maybe to cry.  Maybe it’s the same thing.

He rents out a sleeping pod of his own--no more sharing--now, and it works fine, if only because he’s stopped caring about fashion and just wears the same ridiculous tight pants and floppy ponchos that were in style when he first came to New Paris.  Some days, he claims he’s making a socio-cultural statement.  Some days he just can’t be bothered to give a fuck.

The sleeping pod eats up most of his income from the information pipeline job.  Fortunately, he’s lost interest in the so-called cultural events--kitschy extravaganzas and special-effects showcases, constructions of light and music engineered to wring out emotion that’s ultimately just as fake as the stories--that were party of the whole New Paris package when he got there.  Now, he mostly just spends his time off work drinking.  And alcohol has always been cheap on New Paris.

He does more of his drinking in the bar on the corner of the station near the tangle of cooling pipes where that engineering worker got vapor-burned back in 8.391.  It has an incredible view, an eighty-degree slice of universe broken only by a few barely-visible joins in the plexiglass, but there’s something slightly unsettling about the angle--sometimes the wide sweep of stars, the moons sailing by on the diagonal, a fingernail-clipping of the planet on the edge, sometimes the whole window filled with the planet’s nitrogen storms, churning clouds of deep blue and turquoise--that gives you a deep-seated feeling of falling, or of being about to fall, unoticeable except in the unconscious urge to clutch the edge of your seat.  Grantaire likes it because you can always find a seat in the bar no matter the hour, or because it gives him something to blame his own feelings of malaise on, or because it makes him feel drunk even before the alcohol hits his stomach.

He’s drunk on more than just the unsettling view when Bossuet slides into the seat across from him, a tall, skinny glass of something that glows pink and blue in each hand.  He pushes one at Grantaire as if nothing is different, as if the past year of him hiding from Bossuet was just a few hours, and they’re going to go back to drinking super-sweet drinks with weird names just like they were yesterday.

“Hurricane Jupiters.”  Bossuet answers Grantaire’s unasked question.  “Vodka, Keplerian blueberry juice, and about six things I can’t pronounce.  It’s good, you’ll like it.”

Grantaire takes the drink and swallows obediently.  It’s  _ very _ sweet, and a little thicker than you would expect, with a sour tang not unlike the chewy candies Joly always used to carry around in his pockets (or maybe he still does; it’s not like Grantaire would know).  He hasn’t had a drink like this in a long time, having learned several lunar cycles ago that drinking these kinds of drinks alone just makes you sad and fat.  He just orders whiskey now.  He takes another swallow of the sugary, fluorescent liquid.  It’s . . . it’s good.

The silence has lasted too long.  He looks over at Bossuet, who’s serenely sipping his Hurricane Jupiter with blue-tinted lips, and curses him silently--both for his unflappability and his choice of a drink that’s going to make it impossible to look at him without smiling.

“So, how’s things?” Grantaire asks, stubbornly refusing to be the first one to break and admit to what happened between them.  “Still at the communications center?”

“Still at the communications center,” Bossuet responds.  “Still with Joly and Musichetta.”  Which was what Grantaire had really wanted to ask, anyway.

“Good,” Grantaire says.  He tries to remember how to communicate genuine emotion; comes up short and settles for awkward humor instead.  “I’m surprised you haven’t fucked that up yet--two people, that’s a lot to balance.”  

Shit.  That sounds mean.  He wasn’t trying to be nasty.  He backpedals frantically, trying to cover up his embarassment with a big gulp of his Hurricane Jupiter at the same time, and ends up choking ungracefully on the drink.

“I mean, you know me, I get antsy with even one person,” he gasps, when he can speak again.  “I’m impressed with you--you guys.”

“It’s not easy,” Bossuet says easily, and Grantaire hates himself for the little leap his heart gives.  “Joly overanalyzes everything, you know, and Musichetta has a very--” he outlines firm boundaries with his hands, “-- _ specific _ idea of how things should be, and me . . . well, I don’t take anything as seriously as I should, and that drives the two of them up the wall.”  

He takes another sip of blue liquid.  “But we make it work.  I think . . . I think we’re going to make it work for a long time.”  He smiles shyly.

Grantaire knows Bossuet’s face, and its range of expressions.  You get to know each other pretty well, sharing a space about the size of an XXL coffin.  He knows Bossuet’s first-thing-in-the-morning sleepy face and his grumpy face and his read-to-fight face, and his laughing face--the whole range of laughs, from the sopping drunk laugh to the high-on-thirty-six-hours-of-sleep-deprivation laugh to the surprised and delighted laugh that bursts from his unexpectedly.  He knows what the bare honesty of four in the morning looks like on Bossuet’s face, and the shape his mouth makes when he comes, and the way his eyes twitch when he’s just said something outrageous and is trying to keep a straight face.  And he’s never seen him smile like this.

It’s that smile, so soft and gentle and  _ new, _ that makes Grantaire slam back the rest of the Hurricane Jupiter and mumble an excuse before staggering out into the poorly-lit hallway.

 

* * *

 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Grantaire would pant, not sure if he was reassuring himself or Bossuet.  

They’d be lying on their backs--or rather, one of them on his back, the other on his side agaisnt the pod wall or draped over the other’s chest--in the darkness of the sleeping pod, their naked bodies sticky with sweat and other fluids, listening to the hum of the station machinery and their own ragged breathing.  

The first time they did it, they were  _ so  _ drunk.  Grantaire and Bossuet were both working second shift at the time, so they’d worked it out that Grantaire would sleep during third shift and Bossuet would get the pod first shift--but that day (night, orbit, whatever) dinner after work had turned into a very aggressive karaoke competition at the bar, and before Grantaire realized what had happened it was already first shift and he was absolutely trashed.

“I’ll, uh, crash in Jameel’s pod, maybe,” he mumbled as he and Bossuet staggered down the corridor together.  “He has second--no third--no . . . which shift is it now?  He’s, he’s working now, ‘m pretty sure, so I can just--”

“No way, man,” Bossuet slurred.  “’s not a problem.  You don’t snore, d’you?”  

Grantaire stopped to shake his head and found that that did less than nothing to fix the hallway’s wild swooping.  “It’s your pod.”

“’s half yours,” Bossuet pointed out.  “We’ll both fit.”

They did both fit, it turned out, but only  _ just _ barely.  Grantaire nearly gave Bossuet a black eye in the process of taking off his shirt, and Bossuet slipped on someone’s discarded sock and tumbled over backwards, after which he lay on his back on the floor laughing for nearly two minutes straight.  

Once they finally got into bed, they found they couldn’t  _ quite  _ fit lying side by side on their backs; their breath was way too hot and alcohol soaked to lie facing each other, and lying back-to-back gave Grantaire claustrophobia, the way it pressed his face up against the pod wall.  By the time they’d settled on a spooning position, they’d accidentally elbowed and kicked each other so many times they were breathless with muffled laughter.  Revenge poking and nudging led to a tickle war . . . which led to accidental boners . . . at which Bossuet paused, putting up an eyebrow.

“We’re in New Paris, after all,” he drawled.

Grantaire sniggered and poked him in the ribs; Bossuet doubled up, tumbling over onto Grantaire.  And somehow their lips came together.  And Bossuet’s hands found their way under Grantaire’s shirt.  And Bossuet’s dick wound up in Grantaire’s mouth.

To Grantaire’s surprise, it didn’t destroy their friendship.  And it didn’t turn their friendship into something else.  They kept on being friends; they kept on sharing the pod and sleeping in staggered shifts; they kept on going out to bars and multimedia shows and arguing about the aesthetic qualities of all the illegal light installations that kept going up and being taken down all around the station.  And they kept, every twenty orbits or so, having sex with each other, sometimes just as drunkenly and hilariously as the first time, sometimes a little more sober and--not tender, but . . . gentle.

When he thinks back on it, Grantaire honestly isn’t sure whether it meant as little to him as he claimed.  He was convinced, at the time, that they were just fooling around, that his feelings about Bossuet were friend-feelings, nothing more.  But he’ll be the first to admit that the person most readily fooled by his constant lying is himself.  It’s entirely possible that his weird unnamed Thing with Bossuet meant a great deal to him, and he was just in staunch denial about it.

In any case, they both  _ said _ that it wasn’t a big deal, and once one of them said it meant nothing,  _ obviously  _ the other one couldn’t admit to having Feelings.  So they went on fucking each other and then reassuring each other how little it meant to them, and as far as Grantaire knew at the time, they both believed it.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Bossuet would say, a little breathless still.  “People are so anal--pun intended, of course--about this kind of thing.  Friends have fun together; that’s what this is.”

“That’s all this is,” Grantaire would echo, his fingers idly tracing the fine hairs running down Bossuet’s abdomen.  “Convenient, and  _ so  _ much cheaper than hiring a hooker.  It doesn’t mean anything.”

Ironically, now he can’t remember who actually said it first.

 

* * *

 

It’s not hard to avoid someone in New Paris.  The station is huge, and there are millions of people in it, their lives staggered on three shifts and entertwined and feeding each other in a hundred ways and never really interacting.  If there’s someone on the station you don’t want to talk to, it’s easy in this maze of people and lights and hallways.  

(Even if you sleep in the same four- by four- by eight-foot space as them, you can do it.  Grantaire proved that a year ago, when Bossuet’s flirting with Joly and his laughable string of chance encounters with Musichetta started to become Something More, something better than this weird it-doesn’t-mean-anything thing he had going on with Grantaire.  He found a way to always be heading out of the bar just as they were coming in, to always have a message on his Skware to be checking so that he didn’t notice Bossuet waving from the other side of the atrium, to always take such a winding route through the maze of corridors that anyone following--if there even was anyone--wouldn’t have a prayer of catching him.)

So Grantaire is taken aback when he walks into the ugliest bar in New Paris, the one where the flickering screens show no fewer than four different sports games at any given time, where the only drinks on the menu are brown and all taste like varying proportions of dishwater and lighter fluid, where the floor and counter and plastic seats all exist in a state of perpetual stickiness . . . and there’s Bossuet, sitting in the corner booth under a screen flashing a garish ad for male enhancement pills.  And somehow, he’s managed to finagle a bright pink umbrella for his glass of dishwater.

Before Grantaire can summon up the presence of mind to back out quietly, Bossuet sees him and waves him over.  Grantaire is tempted to say to himself  _ fuck it, we both know what I’ve been doing, why pretend everything is normal?  _ and walk out anyway.  But for some reason, he finds himself crossing the room, the rubber soles of his shoes squawking on the plastic flooring.

He can’t ask Bossuet what the fuck he’s doing in a place like this, because Bossuet would be able to ask him the same question, and there’s really no answer Grantaire is willing to give.  So instead he carefully levers himself onto the sticky bench and accepts the sweating glass the congested server offers him.

“I miss you,” Bossuet says, without preamble.

Grantaire snorts.  “Where do you find the time?”

“I schedule it in every day between my hairdresser and my manicure,” Bossuet deadpans.

Something happens on one of the screens, and two of the men at the bar start cheering; four more start swearing loudly.  “I miss you too,” Grantaire mutters under the chaos, so quietly he can barely hear it.

But Bossuet, damn him, has always had insanely good hearing.  “Then why did you run away?” he asks.

“Didn’t,” Grantaire mutters stubbornly.

Bossuet raises an eyebrow.  “ _ I _ wasn’t the one who started hiding.”

The drink--it might be supposed to be beer--is so horrible Grantaire can’t stand to chug his way through it to get out of this situation faster.  He takes another small swallow and pretends to enjoy it.

“I don’t know why you care,” he growls, through his throat’s attempts to close up in self-defense against the horrible liquid.  “What we--that shit was nothing.  It never meant anything.”

“Did you want it to?” Bossuet asks, very quiet.  His eyes look sad, and that pity makes Grantaire absurdly cantankerous, as if he’s instinctively attempting to cancel out Bossuet’s softness.

“Eh, nothing means anything,” he says, too loud.  “We’re all just bundles of chemicals and genetic information orbiting giant fireballs in a litmitless void; nothing we do could ever have any significance.  I mean, forget about the universe, if you even get a glimpse of a star, you realize how small a single human being is, and it’s fucking terrifying.  Why do you think people have so much sex in New Paris?”  He laughs.  Bossuet doesn’t.

“The, you know, the--all of this--” Grantaire continues, making an expansive gesture which he hopes expresses everything: The ever-shifting mirror-lights, the sound shows and the tasting rooms and the underground poetry scene, all the ridiculous and beautiful and meaningless  _ everything _ that is New Paris. “--it’s all just distraction, something to fill the time until we flicker out.  And any connection we make with anyone else is just an attempt to make ourselves forget about how fast the end is coming.  Which is why it’s great that you found something better, because  _ I _ ’ve never been able to keep my mind off it, no matter what I do.”

He slides off the sticky bench, the plastic making an ugly squelching noise as he unsticks his thighs from it.  For a second, he considers downing the rest of the beer, but he doesn’t think he can stomach it.  So he just leaves it there and turns to go.

Bossuet leans across the table, catching his wrist, and Grantaire wants to pull away--but for some reason, he can’t.  He realizes, suddenly, how long it’s been since anyone touched him.  How warm Bossuet’s fingers feel against his skin.  To his horror, tears spring to his eyes.

“It meant something to me,” Bossuet says.  He pulls Grantaire back into the booth.  “I wasn’t in love with you--but we were friends.  That means something, and I want it back.”

There’s some stupid joke or half-assed insult on the tip of Grantaire’s tongue, but when he opens his mouth the words evaporate away.  And he finds himself saying instead, “I do too.”


End file.
